Mugglestone - The Oxford History of English
.pdf288 lynda mugglestone
Nothing could be more dreadful than the dysentery and cholera wards . . . The thin stuVed sacking that they laid upon Xoors, perfectly rotten and full of vermin; and as I have kneeled by the side of the men, they crawled over my hand onto my book; in fact the place was alive with them. I have asked the orderlies why were these Xoors not cleaned; and the answer was, and Dr McGregor told me so, that the wood was so rotten, that if it were properly washed it could not be got dry again.
It was very close—bad smell, very—the smell of wounds and Wlth . . . There was both salt and fresh—that is, preserved meat. There was also sago. No porter or wine. Those who acted as orderlies got grog, nobody else . . . I was only six days in hospital. I then became an orderly, caught the fever and went into hospital . . . It was the 9th of the month. I got every thing comfortable.
pronounced distinctions
This is, of course, not to suggest that we do not know anything about the spoken voices of the time. Even if the ephemerality of calls made on the recentlyintroduced telephone ensured that no direct evidence of this kind remains, indirect evidence, from a range of sources, is plentiful. Informal spelling patterns in private texts can reveal otherwise hidden phonetic nuances, as in Anne Lister’s rendering of dreamed as dreampt (with its intrusive [p]) in a diary entry from January 1835. Similarly, the Northumbrian engineer George Stephenson’s letters reveal not only his laboriously (and imperfectly) acquired literacy, but also regionalities of accent in forms such as geather (‘gather’) and gretter (‘greater’); spellings of sute (‘suit’)—presumably with [s] rather than the [sj] commended in manuals of ‘correct’ articulation—and of shore (‘sure’), yore (‘your’) indicate other pronunciations which gradually established themselves as co-existing variants in nineteenth-century speech. Other private documents provide further illuminating evidence of spoken usage. As the Darwin correspondence indicates, young William Darwin’s (b. 1839) habit of referring to himself as ‘Villie Darvin’ displayed his ready assimilation of the London accents of the servants. While this caused no little amusement in the Darwin household, from a linguistic point of view it gives incontrovertible evidence of the continued alternation of [v] and [w] into the mid-nineteenth century (often regarded as an anachronism deployed, as by Dickens, for comic eVect in literary approximations of lowstatus speech).
Works which (on a variety of levels) explicitly focused on the spoken language also provide considerable amounts of information. Alexander Ellis’s concern for
english in the nineteenth century 289
phonetic exactitude makes, for example, a welcome contrast to the prescriptive appeals which featured in many manuals of linguistic etiquette. While the latter draw attention to a range of spoken shibboleths, the nature of prescriptive rhetoric can, however, make it diYcult to discern the true linguistic situation. If the presence of post-vocalic [r] in words such as car was, for instance, frequently commended as essential in ‘standard’ speech, other comments make it clear that, as in modern English, its loss instead characterized a range of speakers, in upperas well as under-class. Retained in Scotland, Ireland, and the accents of the south-west of England, its vocalization was complete by the early/mid-nineteenth century in London and the south-east. Images of literacy (and literate speech) can nevertheless, as here, inXuence the variants which are formally accepted. Visual proprieties undoubtedly underpinned not only the rise of spelling pronunciations for words such as waistcoat (earlier [weskIt]), but also the increasing insistence on [h] as a marker of educatedness, leading to its presence in words such as hospital, herb, humble, and humour in which it had hitherto been silent (older or more conservative speakers nevertheless retained [ju:m@] for the latter, even in the late nineteenth century). In contrast, herb remained [h]-less in American English. The number of books dedicated to the pronunciation of [h] alone serves to indicate the salience which accent gradually assumed during this period. Smith’s Mind Your H’s and Take Care of Your R’s was published in 1866; Harry Hawkins’ H Book by Ellen Eccles appeared in 1879, The Letter H. Past, Present, and Future by Alfred Leach followed in 1880, while over 43,000 copies of Poor Letter H. Its Use and Abuse were sold by the mid-1860s. As the Oxford scholar Thomas Kington-Oliphant declared, as he sought to deWne the standard English of the late nineteenth century, the pronunciation of [h] was indeed ‘the fatal letter’. Even the moderate Ellis felt bound to confess that its omission where it should be present was tantamount to social suicide.
Social feelings about accent ran high, reXected even in such consummate works of reference as Chambers’s Encyclopaedia and the OED. The OED entry for accent, written in fact by Ellis, reveals its changed signiWcance in the nineteenth century. ‘This utterance consists mainly in a prevailing quality of tone, or in a peculiar alteration of pitch, but may include mispronunciation of vowels or consonants, misplacing of stress, and misinXection of a sentence. The locality of a speaker is generally clearly marked by this kind of accent’. While, as here, accent had come to signify the localized above the non-localized (often in ways, as in Ellis’s use of mispronunciation, which deliberately connote the non-standard), it was the accentless—that is a ‘colourless’ form of speech devoid of localized markers—which was popularly used to deWne ‘educated’ and ‘standard’ speech. ‘It is the business of educated people to
290 lynda mugglestone
speak so that no-one may be able to tell in what county their childhood was passed’, as the elocutionist Alexander Burrell averred in 1891. It was this which provided a core element of the ‘received pronunciation’ or RP which Ellis formally speciWed in 1869 (‘In the present day we may . . . recognise a received pronunciation all over the country, not widely diVering in any particular locality, and admitting a certain degree of variety’).
The extent to which ‘standard speech’ was indeed used is, on the other hand, debatable. While the rhetoric of standardization seized on accent as a further strand by which the ‘best’ speakers might be deWned, the realities of usage were, as always, far more complex. As Ellis repeatedly stressed, received pronunciation had to be seen as highly variable. Age-grading led to the co-existence of older and newer variants. Queen Victoria recalled hearing forms such as goold (for gold) and ooman (for woman) from older speakers in the early nineteenth century. Dickens likewise manipulated awareness of the down-shifting of variants earlier praised for their reWnement. His representation of words such as kiend and kiender (for kind and kind of ) for the Yarmouth Wsherman Mr Peggotty in David CopperWeld (‘I’m kiender muddled’, ‘My niece was kiender daughter-like’) hence represents the outmoded (and increasingly nonstandard) presence of a palatal glide /kj-/. Given as a marker of indisputable vocal elegance by John Walker in his Rhetorical Grammar (1781; 3rd edn, 1801), it was conWned to the ‘antiquated’ and ‘old-fashioned’ by Ellis in 1869. The lengthened [A:] in words such as last, past, and path (a marker of non-localized speech in modern English) also remained variable, both in realization and framing language attitudes. While the shipping magnate Charles Booth was condemned in the 1840s by his prospective in-laws for his ‘Xat northern a’, realizations with the fully lengthened [A:] could conversely be proscribed for their ‘Cockney’ associations. Compromise or ‘middle’ sounds, praised for their ‘delicacy’, were recommended for speakers worried about the precise nuances of social identity which might otherwise be revealed. ‘Avoid a too broad or too slender pronunciation of the vowel a in words such as glass . . . Some persons vulgarly pronounce the a in such words, as if written ar, and others mince it so as to rhyme with stand’, as Smith’s Mind Your H’s (1866) dictated. Pronunciation of words such as oV as [O:f] shared the same evaluative patterns, being linked with underas much as upper-class for much of the century. A speciWc set of non-localized pronunciation features (the presence of [h] in words such as hand, [I˛] rather than [In] in words such as running, the vocalization of [r] in words such as bird, and the use of /V/ (rather than /U/) in words such as butter and cut)) repeatedly surfaced in deWnition of the ‘best’ speakers in the second half of the nineteenth century.
english in the nineteenth century 291
Pressures to acquire a non-regionally marked accent could be prominent, especially in educational terms. The use of the regionally-marked [U] instead of [V] in words such as cut was, for instance, explicitly condemned as a feature of ‘Defective Intelligence’ (alongside the omission of [h]) by the educational writer John Gill. His popular Introductory Text-Book to School Management (1857) was a set text in many of the training colleges for teachers which were established after 1850. Teachers were exhorted to eradicate their own regional accents as incompatible with the educational status they sought to attain. As The Teacher’s Manual of the Science and Art of Teaching (1874) aYrmed, the good teacher had ‘to guard himself’ against provincialisms since ‘if his intercourse with others accustom him to erroneous modes of pronunciation and speech, he will be in danger of setting these up as standards’. Inspectors of schools endorsed these objectives. ‘A master
. . . should read frequently with [the children] during a lesson, and take pains to correct their incorrect pronunciation, e.g. the prevalent provincialisms of a district’, stated H. W. Bellairs in his General Report for 1848–9; ‘Attempts are made, with considerable success, to combat the peculiarities of the Lancashire pronunciation’, T. Marshall commended in the same year. The favoured metalanguage of such reports (‘incorrectness’, ‘peculiarity’, ‘provinciality’) readily participated in prescriptive notions of norm and deviation. Regional accents were ‘depraved’, the language scholar Thomas Batchelor had aYrmed of Bedfordshire speech in 1809. Charlotte Bronte¨ shed her Irish accent (acquired from her father) while at Roe Head School in MirWeld (being awarded a silver badge for ‘correctness of speech’ in recognition of her endeavours); George Eliot lost her rustic Midlands accent while at the Miss Franklins’ school in Coventry. Michael Faraday attended Benjamin Smart’s lectures on elocution in London in the early nineteenth century as part of his own processes of linguistic self-education.
Nevertheless, as the phonetician Henry Sweet emphasized in 1881, the ‘correct speaker’ remained elusive in the realities of everyday English. He compared his own quest for this phenomenon to ‘going after the great sea-serpent’, concluding that such a creature ‘is not only extraordinarily shy and diYcult of capture, but . . .
he may be put in the same category as the ‘‘rigid moralist’’ and ‘‘every schoolboy’’ ’. In other words, ‘he is an abstraction, a Wgment of the brain’. Instead, as Ellis observed, register, gender, age, and status all operated to inXuence the variants which might be deployed in any one instance. The transcriptions of speech which Ellis made while at the theatre or public lectures conWrmed him in this view. Many prominent nineteenth-century speakers were self-evidently immune to popular prescriptive exhortations to shed regionalized features of speech. Gladstone retained his Liverpool articulations and Robert Peel’s Lancashire accent was equally unmistakable. Thomas Hardy (his own voice marked by the ‘thick, western
292 lynda mugglestone
utterance’, as the novelist George Gissing disparagingly observed) was gratiWed in 1884 to note the ‘broad Devon accent’ of his host Lord Portsmouth. As such examples conWrm, regionality was not, in fact, incompatible with educatedness or with status. Popular notions of an absolute norm once again foundered on the complexities of co-variation, just as they did on the pluralism of actual language practice. The spoken English of the nineteenth century remained mutable, attesting the rise of new features such as the glottal stop and the rise of intrusive [r] (as in constructions such as idea of /aidI@r @v/), or the presence of new homophones such as pore and pour which, although castigated for their ‘slovenliness’, came to constitute an undeniable part of the informal speech patterns of the day.
dialects and difference
Regionality, as we have seen, served as a popular nineteenth-century image of the non-standard, able to localize speakers in ways which prescriptive writers decried. ‘Proper’ pronunciation was ‘maltreated . . . by the natives of Somersetshire, Devonshire, StaVordshire, Lancashire, and Yorkshire’, as P’s and Q’s (1855) averred. Speakers within these areas would not necessarily have agreed. William Barnes defended the expressive potential of dialect against what he termed ‘book-speech’. To prove his point, he translated Queen Victoria’s speech, made on opening Parliament in 1863, into Dorset (see Fig. 10.1). Barnes determinedly rejected the connotations of inferiority which regional speech could attract, noting, for example, the absence in the standard variety of pronominal distinctions which were present in Dorsetshire: ‘Whereas Dorset men are laughed at for what is taken as their misuse of pronouns, . . . the pronouns of true Dorset, are Wtted to one of the Wnest outplannings of speech that I have found’. Throughout the century there was a vigorous interest in dialect writing, particularly after the foundation of the English Dialect Society (see Chapter 11), but also before. Much of this, as James Milroy has stressed, sought to ‘historicize the rural dialects of English—to give them histories side by side with the standard language and, in some cases, to codify them’.6 Just as nineteenth-century scientists strove to investigate variation within the history of forms, so did contemporary dialectologists locate the value of research into the geographical variabilities of English. Indeed, as Holloway suggested in his Dictionary of Provincialisms (1839), in future
6 See J. Milroy, ‘The Legitimate Language. Giving a History to English’, in R. Watts and P. Trudgill (eds), Alternative Histories of English (London: Routledge, 2002), 14.
english in the nineteenth century 293
Fig. 10.1. Queen Victoria’s Speech to the Houses on Opening Parliament in 1863, translated into the Dorset dialect
Source: From W. Barnes, A Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect with the History, Outspreading, and Bearings of South-Western English (London: Tru¨bner & Co,
1864), 10.
years ‘antiquaries may feel the same delight in poring over these remains of a bygone age, as Cuvier did in putting together the bones of the antediluvian animals which he discovered’. Endeavours to record the regional were spurred by common fears that, like the dinosaur (a word coined by the scientist Richard Owen in 1841), its forms were in danger of extinction. ‘Railways, telegraph, and School Boards—steam, electricity, and education—are surely killing dialects’, Nicholson wrote in the Folk Speech of East Yorkshire (1889). He carefully noted the idiomatic force of words such as Wre-fanged (used for a cake that has been left in the oven
294 lynda mugglestone
for too long) and dowly (‘a lowly, gruesome spot is a dowly spot’). Empirical investigation was presented as important; the Committee on Devonshire Verbal Provincialisms, chaired by Fred Elworthy (a subeditor and frequent contributor to the OED), closely paralleled the OED in its emphasis on the dating and use of each form (‘state, if possible, the sex, occupation, birth-place, residence, and age of the person using each recorded provincialism . . . give the meaning of each recorded provincialism, . . . illustrate that meaning by embodying the word or phrase in a sentence, if possible the very sentence in which it was used’). Resulting evidence presented a clear documentary record, as in the following entries:
Fleeches ¼ large Xakes (rhymes with ‘breeches’). A servant girl, native of Pawle, South Devon, residing at Torquay, and about twenty-three years of age, stated in March, 1877, that the snow was ‘falling in Xeeches,’ meaning in large Xakes. She added that the small Xakes were not Xeeches. 19 March, 1877.
Bedlayer ¼ one who is bedridden of conWned to bed. Mrs. W—, aged 65, labourer’s wife, of Woodford Ham, often used the word ‘bedlayer’. April, 1885.
Urban dialects also attracted interest, as in Bywater’s The SheYeld Dialect, in Conversations (1834) or Tum o’ Dick o’ Bobs’s Lankisher Dickshonary by Joseph Baron (n.d.), with its opening poem in celebration of the regional forms of Lancashire (see Fig. 10.2). A common pattern was nevertheless to see these as the negative counterpart of ‘purer’, rural varieties. Robinson’s Dialect of Leeds (1862) hence contrasts the ‘bright ‘side of dialects—‘teeming with ancient word relics . . . replete with the sturdiness, forcefulness, and wisdom of times when words were fewer, and had more of a meaning than they have now’—with their ‘dark side’, evident in ‘towns and cities’. The latter was merely ‘barbarous English’ and ‘the result of vicious habits’. As here, the fertility of nineteenthcentury urban dialects, especially as a result of the immigration of workers from other areas, was regarded as corruption, lacking the legitimacy of the past. Migrants from Cornwall, Ireland, East Anglia, the Yorkshire Dales, and Scotland gravitated to towns such as Nelson and BriarWeld, near Burnley; as Jill Liddington has noted, ‘Cornish accents were soon mingling with East Anglian ones, Rossendale folk settling down next door to Scots or Irish families’.7 So many Cornish families moved north that part of Lancashire was colloquially
7 See J. Liddington, The Life and Times of a Respectable Rebel: Selina Cooper, (1864–1946) (London: Virago, 1984), 11.
english in the nineteenth century 295
Fig. 10.2. ‘Th’ Dickshonary’, by Teddy Ashton
Source: From J. Baron, Tum o’ Dick o’ Bobs’s Lankisher Dickshonary (Manchester: John Heywood, n.d.).
designated ‘Little Cornwall’. Around 50,000 Irish were in Liverpool in 1841; over 68,000 in Glasgow by 1871.
While this relationship between ‘national’ and ‘local’ foregrounds one image of division in nineteenth-century English, further images are located in the marginalized voices of the working classes. Often used in contemporary writings as a stereotype of linguistic infelicity, especially where urban speech forms were concerned, such voices are often forgotten in histories of the language, many of which present a seamless equation of ‘educatedness’ and ‘Englishness’. It was, however, the working classes (rather than the middle or upper sections of society) who, at least in numerical terms, dominated Victorian Britain. The English of the working classes hence remains an important resource for establishing the real range and diversity of language practices at this time.
296 lynda mugglestone
Working-class diaries, journals, and letters exist in abundance. The Lancashire weaver John O’Neil (b. 1810 in Carlisle) hence combines regional grammar with an astute understanding of the wider political situation which underpinned the cotton crisis of the early 1860s (‘All the mills in Clitheroe commenced work this morning. At Low Moor there is a great many oV. There is above a hundred looms standing . . . Civil War has broke out in the United States . . . another battle was fought in Missouri when the rebels was routed with the loss of 1500 men’); variabilities of grammar and spelling feature liberally in the journal of William Tayler, a footman born in Grafton in Oxfordshire in 1807. As in his expanded tenses and use of do, Tayler’s words often usefully illustrate developments which are proscribed within the standard variety:
I did intend to have gon out but here are two more people has just called on me . . . Had one gentleman and a lady to dinner and two old maids viseting in the kitchen—they has been servants but being unsucessfull in getting places they took a bublic house They say, when in service, they always heared servants very much run down and dispised but since they have been keeping a bublic house they have had an opertunity of seeing the goings on amongst the tradespeople [.] they consider them a most drunken disepated swareing set of people. Servants, they say, are very much more respectable.
Working-class diaries of this kind moreover exhibit an idiomatic quality of syntax which can be lost in printed texts. ‘I think I was about seventeen, about 1803, when on a Sabbath day, walking out with a young man to whom I was much attached, a person put a track [i.e. tract] in my hand, which I took care oV and read afterward,—but I don’t recollect the exact eVect [.] but this was partly owing to my friends dog running down a fowl, which my companion put in his pocket and took and eat at a house which he and I used to go to— but after this I never went more, no, not to partake of it’, as the dissenter Thomas Swan recorded in the Wrst entry in his journal in 1841. Individual examples can of course be multiplied, whether in the extensive memoirs of James Hutchinson (a Victorian cabinet-maker), or the recollections of the mining butty, Emanuel Lovekin (born in 1820 in StaVordshire), who presents a narrative characterized by its compelling orality of syntax and style (‘[Edna] as ad two children, But as buried one Emanuel, is liveing at Wigan he as one child a Boy . . . But every year make a change, and especially in some families. But I hope they will all do well and live happy together and honner God’). As a collective voice, records of this kind serve to challenge the patronizing stereotypes which could surround the lower classes of the nineteenth century when seen from the standpoint of those higher in the social order. The inarticulacy of Dickens’s Wctional weaver Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times
english in the nineteenth century 297
(1854), with his iterated lament of ‘It’s aw a muddle’, in this respect bears little relationship to the clarity of comprehension and expression eVected by writers such as O’Neil through (and not in spite of) their command of regional grammar.
world of words
‘Verily a wonderful world, when we survey it . . . is the World of Words, but how impossible its exact census, how laborious the work of its exploration’, wrote James Murray as he contemplated the editing of the New English Dictionary (later to be known as the OED). Nineteenth-century lexis was wide-ranging, and the account given in this chapter is necessarily selective. Even the OED would be incomplete, in spite of its intended status as an ‘inventory’ of English. ‘The word was spoken before it was written’, Murray stressed; some words might be used for some twenty or thirty years before a record of their use was found. Others would never emerge into what he termed ‘the dignity of print’. It remains easy to Wnd examples to prove his point. Smatter (‘To dabble in (a subject)’), was used (according to the OED) from 1883 yet it can be antedated by half a century in Darwin’s private usage. ‘I . . .
smattered in biology’, he wrote in 1838. Still more striking is the gap between the OED’s entry for dolting (< dolt, ‘To act like a dolt, to play the fool’) and the evidence available in George Eliot’s private correspondence. Two sixteenthcentury citations provide the substance of the OED entry—yet dolting was clearly still in use. ‘The eVect is dolting and feeble’, Eliot wrote on 4 December 1877. The inventory of the OED inevitably remains open to revision and reassessment. Nevertheless, in its commitment to empirical investigation, its painstaking documentation of the history and use of words, and its scholarly regard for sources, it represents a supreme linguistic achievement. Six million citations (many collected through the endeavours of volunteers) provided the underlying corpus of evidence; over two million entries (and 178 miles of type) would make up the text of the Wrst edition, publication of which spanned
1884–1928.
The existence of the OED therefore provides an unparalleled resource for nineteenth-century English (as well as that of earlier periods). The lexical range of English at this time was striking. New words from India, Africa, and the Caribbean conWrmed the colonial present (as did associated connotative meanings); here might be listed such importations as amah (‘A name given in the